COLONIALISMO Y REPRESENTACION. HACIA UNA RELECTURA DEL LATINOAMERICANISMO, DEL INDIGENISMO Y DE LOS DISCURSOS ETNIA-CLASE EN LOS ANDES DEL SIGLO XX

The purpose of this study is to highlight the colonial assumptions underlying the representations, and narratives of Latinamericanism, Indigenism, and hegemonic discourses about ethnicity, locating them in the social, political, and cultural context of the twentieth-century Andes. The first chapter deals with Latinamericanism as a discursive formation that supported the dominant forms of political identity in Latin America from the emergency of a criollo subjectivity in the colonial period to the present. I argue that the genealogy of the Latin American subject implies an understanding of the criollo project of "colonial self-determination" as a political "imposture" that legitimized its position as subject of knowledge and power.The second chapter focuses on the critical discourse of Peruvian writer José Carlos Mariátegui, to show how his cultural criticism is complicit in constructing essentialist images of indigenous societies as an exotic other, and how it continues to be articulated within the perceptional and representational structures of colonial epistemologies. From this same perspective, in the third chapter I analyze the novel Yanakuna (1952) by the Bolivian writer Jesús Lara and his narrative worlds. Finally, the focus shifts to the emerging discourses of subaltern indigenous subjectivities, focusing on number of marginal, non-canonical testimonies from Ecuador by José Yánez del Pozo: Yo declaro con franqueza (1986). In shifting my attention to the "small voice of history" (Guha), I try to present the problematic relationship between the Marxist concept of class subject and these narratives of identity, highlighting the local agency and ethnic identities within contending emancipatory political projects in Ecuador